Editors-in-Chief
Lauren Saunders
Lauren Saunders (b.1990, London) is a professional visual and participatory artist based in Hull, UK, who works across community practice, installation, drawing and sculpture, events and song-based performance to drive equitable and meaningful climate action. Through her own experiential lenses of class, feminism and disability, her practice-research centres on expanding the definition of community to include the more-than-human through the cultivation of radical compassion, kindness and kinship with the natural world.
She maintains a robust professional practice and is an experienced community artsworker with a strong track record of delivering meaningful, accessible artistic commissions and projects within healthcare, education and community environments.
Not only is Lauren the Co-Director of The Critical Fish, she is also the Arts Lead for Hull Friends of the Earth and on the committee for Hull Musical Theatre Company.
Dr Jill Howitt
Following a long career in arts education, at all levels, Jill now focus on research, writing about art, and facilitating workshops. She completed a PHD in Art History with the Open University in 2023, focusing on ‘Public Art and Coastal Sites in the North of England (1989-2020):
Middlesbrough, Liverpool, and Hull’.
Jill’s interdisciplinary work lies somewhere between critical writing, contextual theory, and creative practice, in which is becoming increasingly climate and nature focused. She is working on the interplay of the academic, personal/ individual, and collaborative in her writing. She believes that ‘culture is our common property’ (a quote from Assemble) and she loves ‘doing art history’ / discussing art with diverse groups and ages.
Jill is Co-Director of The Critical Fish and is involved with Culture Declares Emergency and Hull Samaritans.
Guest Editors
Barnaby Haran
Barnaby is a senior lecturer at University of Hull in the American Studies department, where he teaches histories of art, visual culture, film, and cultural politics. He is the author of Watching the Red Dawn: the American Avant-Garde and the Soviet Union (Manchester University Press, 2016). He is currently writing on American documentary photography
from the 1930s, and has received funding from the British Academy and the Terra Foundation for research for several articles and book chapters. He also co-edited the Fountain17 catalogue with Jill Howitt.
Mary Aherne
Mary Aherne writes poetry and short fiction and her work has been published in various anthologies and journals including Hull, City of Poets, South and Grindstone. She has
edited and contributed to a number of Humber Writers’ collaborations including Hide, Postcards from Hull, Under Travelling Skies, Slipway and Incoming, commissioned for
the Humber Mouth and Beverley Literature Festivals. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Hull. Recent projects include Shards, a collection of poems celebrating
Hornsea Pottery, a number of which have been included in a public art trail, and ‘The Beauty of Indifference’ for Fountain17, a response to the work of Marcel Duchamp.